Writing

The Art of a Healing Heart

RobertLeave a comment

Oof. Donald Trump president, again. But enough about him. I want to reflect a little on this blog and what it means for times like this. It’s called humanconditioned and the ‘About’ page sums it up nicely (which is convenient, because I wrote it):

The human is a highly conditioned being. We’re regularly told who to be, how to behave and why it’s best to just fit in. Yet all this cajoling and moulding is anathema to the one thing the frail human condition craves – freedom. But not freedom from being human but freedom to be human in as many different ways as there are people (with a few important caveats around not hurting other people and the planet).

Back when I started the blog in April 2015 the little title beneath the big one used to read “Because the human is not the humanconditioned” and now it reads “Human unconditioner: apply liberally”. And while I didn’t always know it at the time many of my posts have been expressions of the things I’ve been discovering and learning on my journey. That journey to uncondition myself from the toxic beliefs and behavioural patterns instilled into younger me and to find freedom beyond them.

And let me tell you it’s a wild ride. I am letting go of the fear and anger that used to dictate so much of my behaviour. I am better able to navigate uncertainty. And I have so much time for joy and love and patience and liberation. Fundamental to this journey is an exploration of my past, so as to find the pain and trauma there, and bring to them healing. And when my heart heals, it changes. If anything, it gets bigger. Something else that has grown is my imagination as I take the time to imagine stories and worlds underpinned by queer, intersectional feminism. And throughout all of this I do one of the things I love the most – I write.

I write plays about queer teenagers changing the world they live in, I write novels about a queer guy solving murders in 1920s London, and I write blog posts like this. Unconditioning, healing and changing have unleashed my imagination and heightened my confidence to take creative risks and explore new worlds, and my art is the better for it. To be clear – my writing, including this blog, is not a how-to guide for healing but it is an expression of healing and an exploration of what it takes to change. What it takes to uncondition the fragile human heart and set it free. At a time when so much of the world seems committed to violence and so much art reflects this, it’s vital that we continue (or begin) our journeys of healing. In times like this I think healing is necessary, I also think it is meaningful – especially in a world where it can be so hard to find meaning. Just like love and truth, healing counts, and it has taken me places that a younger me couldn’t even imagine. And I use those experiences as inspiration for my writing thereby creating the art of a healing heart.

Photo by Neal Fowler

The Gay Novel Is Dead, Long Live The Gay Novel

RobertLeave a comment

I’m often late to the party and this holds true for Alan Hollinghurst’s proclamation that the gay novel is dead. He was at the Hay Festival a few months back (which in the world of news might as well be years ago) and said this of the gay novel: “I think as such it has had its day. It rose in the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties in response to these new opportunities and new challenges and the two big clarities — the one of liberation and the one of Aids — and there was an urgency, a novelty to the whole thing. In our culture at least those things are no longer the case. I observe that the gay novel is dissolving back into everything else and we are living increasingly in a culture where sexuality is not so strongly defined.” Late, as ever, I’ll offer my ten pink pounds on why the gay novel cannot dissolve and die.

Because the opposite of the gay novel is not the straight novel it’s the novel and in the “novel”, as in “life”, heterosexuality is taken for granted. Men fall in love with women and vice versa or maybe people don’t fall in love at all but whatever happens you can be sure that homosexuality won’t be visible or if it is it will be a joke, trope or tokenised. If a character’s sexuality isn’t referenced the assumption will be that they’re straight unless they’re some flaming stereotype. Homosexual characters will be defined by or reduced to their sexuality and not given sufficient agency to be human. Their storylines will end, if given sufficient pages to end, in some sort of tragedy, despair or loneliness. And that’s not good enough.

So, I want more gay novels, many more. Until the wounds of the AIDS crisis have healed. Until I see myself and so many others reflected in culture over and over again. Until culture has liberated itself so much that we have the option to let go, a little, of our strongly defined sexualities because the fight is won and not because we are exhausted and need some time to lie low. Until the “gay novel” is not forced to define itself by its sexuality because heterosexual people lack imagination and harbour prejudice. Until the “everything else” that the gay novel dissolves back into is as gay and queer as fuck. Then, and only then, can Hollinghurst give up on the day job. Although I hope he doesn’t because we will always need brilliant novels written by men who love men.